Will look into burning methane clathrates in situ on the ocean floor.

The University of California, Irvine has been granted $1 million to develop a unique laboratory for the research of clean energy obtained from methane hydrates, an as-yet untapped source of methane gas that exists in huge quantities in some ocean-floor environments.

Methane hydrates are clathrate compounds, where the methane molecules are trapped in a lattice of water ice—hence their alternate names, methane clathrate and methane ice. They occur where methane and water are present at favorable combinations of low temperatures and high pressure. These conditions restrict clathrates to undersea locations at polar latitudes and along continental shelves, where they are distributed within the sedimentary bed.

Such environments are plentiful, of course, and so it's unsurprising that methane hydrate is thought to be abundant on planet Earth. However, as our understanding of methane hydrate formation has grown, our best guess as to the extent of the reserves has become smaller. Currently, the most conservative estimate is that there are between 500 and 2,500 gigatonnes of carbon in submarine gas hydrate deposits, the majority of which are in the form of methane.

Even at the low end, however, this is more than double the Earth's 230 gigatonnes of natural gas from other sources. According to the Department of Energy, methane hydrates are Earth's largest untapped fossil fuel resource. But quantity isn't everything; it's the size of the deposits that may one day prove commercially viable to tap that are key. This category of methane hydrates may prove to be a small proportion of the total.

Extracting methane hydrate poses certain logistical headaches, including the prevention of methane gas escape. Though shorter-lived in the atmosphere, as a greenhouse gas, methane is many times as effective as carbon dioxide (and typically ends up being oxidized to CO2 anyway). When it's used as fuel, carbon dioxide is the primary output.

The researchers at UC Irvine, led by Derek Dunn-Rankin and Peter Taborek, want to see if we could sidestep both issues. They plan on examining whether it might be possible to use the methane and sequester the resulting carbon dioxide, all at its undersea source. "There are, of course, tremendous challenges and uncertainty regarding the in situ utilization of methane hydrates, but the ultra high pressure environment of the deep ocean offers some new ways to think about clean power production," Dunn-Rankin told Ars.

To that end, the new laboratory will contain a combustion reactor vessel and a multiphase emission evolution vessel that will allow the combustion of methane from methane hydrate in simulated deep-sea conditions. "The point of the multiphase emission evolution vessel is to see how the presence of other combustion emission gases affects the CO2 capture and stability," Dunn-Rankin explained. "It is to look for the kinetics of hydrates and mechanisms that might enhance their stability." The methane hydrate used will itself be made in the lab.

So is there a plan to trap the carbon dioxide in a similar icy prison?

"It is not necessarily a new hydrate form," Dunn-Rankin told Ars. "The real issue is that if you put CO2 hydrate into surroundings that have no CO2 dissolved into them, the thermodynamics would force the CO2 to gradually try to equilibrate the surroundings—which means the hydrate would dissolve. This is shown to be the case in most laboratory tests and theory. The thing is, the methane hydrates should do the same thing and yet they are stable on very long timescales. The understanding of why this might occur, the kinetics of the processes, and the effects of small amounts of natural surfactants and other species is unknown."

The goal so far as methane hydrate is concerned, Dunn-Rankin explained, is to see if it makes any sense to use methane hydrate at the source. However, it's thought that the lab could also see use for broader energy-related research into fuel cells, obtaining hydrogen from methane, and water purification.

Given the focus of the research, we shouldn't expect that this new facility will handle all the unanswered questions surrounding the potential for methane hydrate exploitation. The role of methane hydrate in the stability of the ocean floor is not fully understood, and its extraction, by drilling or other means, may contribute to landslides on sloping sea floor. But the research does at least hint at the possibility of a more sophisticated approach to fossil fuel extraction and use.

Asked if he saw an inevitability to the use of methane hydrate as a source of energy, Dunn-Rankin's response is nuanced. "For me, the use of methane hydrate as a source of energy in the future depends more on what alternative sources of energy are available," he said. "The advances in the extraction of natural gas from shale seem to me also likely to dampen enthusiasm for more expensive and potentially riskier energy source utilization. This said, our efforts to understand hydrate dissolution and formation will always have value for the sequestration side of the problem and will allow rational considerations of methane hydrate utilization as well (we hope)."

85 Reader Comments

Burning the fuel where it exists rather than transporting it to a power plant is a fantastic idea, and with the estimates of the amounts, it sounds like this is a tremendous energy opportunity. But only $1M of funding seems drastically low for a concept with such promise.

oh, oh, oh, I must be some kind of undiscovered genius! Not smart enought to figure out how to quote from comment threads of another article into this article, but... this is what I commented to another article on clathrates:

This sounds too simple and obvious to be possible, and smarter people than me are already involved and have probably thought of it, but... why not pump liquid oxygen down instead of liquid CO2, burn/react the methane down there, and leave the CO2 down there? Not saying that is easy, but none of this is easy.

oh, oh, oh, I must be some kind of undiscovered genius! Not smart enought to figure out how to quote from comment threads of another article into this article, but... this is what I commented to another article on clathrates:

This sounds too simple and obvious to be possible, and smarter people than me are already involved and have probably thought of it, but... why not pump liquid oxygen down instead of liquid CO2, burn/react the methane down there, and leave the CO2 down there? Not saying that is easy, but none of this is easy.

Methane clathrates will be exploited hundreds of years from now, if we ever run out of fossil fuels. As it will be more of a mining than a piping operation, the complexities are enormous. Think an open mine hundreds of meters below sea level. Today's technology is just not there.

Of course people need not ever run out of fossils, if only people opt for clean, virtually unlimited, CO2-free, safe nuclear energy. This we now have, but the Green lobby strenuously rejects it.

I wouldn't mind the money spend on this way out there 99.9% likely to be super expensive energy alternative, if at the same time we could get Obama to spend more than a tiny percentage of subsidy and DOE money on advanced nuclear ($250M) - a 100% guaranteed to work already developed dirt cheap solution to AGW.. $3B a year for a program to build the DMSR and blueprint ready IFR would be the best investment a nation could make. The halfwits in the White House spend close to $15B annually on nuke weapons and close to $100B on worthless wind/solar R&D and subsidy.

Course the Chinese are already building the HTGR for 2017 service that the Obama and his team of halfwits are spending their $250M on, projecting costs of 1 cent a kwh and have 70% of the output designated for 60 cent a gallon synfuel production. I guess once the Bomba is gone, he doesn't care if the US has an energy economy that can compete with China's.

The main struggle lies between Christopher and John Ross. Christopher, the good guy, has abandoned drilling in favor of exploring alternative energy sources; his hopes lie in methane hydrates (frozen methane trapped on the ocean floor). John Ross, on the other hand, is a fracking fanatic. In typical Big Oil, bad-guy fashion, he is a liar and cheater motivated purely by greed. Much of the tension in the show will surely arise from John Ross’s desire to drill in Southfork, home to the Ewing family.

Seriously, tho, there are two reasons why this research is worth funding. One is as a possible energy source. The other, which depends on information not in this article, is that there is a serious danger that the methane might leave the clathrates and enter the atmousphere as the planet warms. Which is bad news. So better to convert it to something else, and get energy. And if you can leave the CO2 buried down there in a safe form, all the better.

Methane clathrates will be exploited hundreds of years from now, if we ever run out of fossil fuels. As it will be more of a mining than a piping operation, the complexities are enormous. Think an open mine hundreds of meters below sea level. Today's technology is just not there.

Of course people need not ever run out of fossils, if only people opt for clean, virtually unlimited, CO2-free, safe nuclear energy. This we now have, but the Green lobby strenuously rejects it.

Sure, just drop the US Federal insurance on nuc plants, let the private sector pick up insuring against hazards and then figure out what to do with high level waste. Then you're golden.

The problem with fission power is that it's simply too expensive when you remove even some of the externalities. Yes, we externalize fossil fuel costs but the nuclear industry has just shown it really can't scale beyond where we currently are, even if we leave all of the protective legislation in place.

But lets get specific:

Clean - yes, in one important sense, no carbon output (except on construction, deconstruction but we will let those slide for a bit since we hardly ever talk about these inputs for the fossil fuel industry). But there IS the problem of waste storage. You'd think we could solve it but we haven't.

CO2 free - OK

Safe - arguable. You switch one set of risks for others. The industry really hasn't shown itself to be particularly trustworthy in this respect. Again, there is the high level waste problem.

Unlimited? Hardly. Do you understand how much it costs to build a nuc plant? That's the main reason no one is doing it. Billions of dollars to get one up and running. Yes, there are 'answers' - small scale, mass produced reactors, Thorium cycle, whatever. Yes, nuclear will be with us for quite some time and will likely pick up a few percentage points but for the cost, you might as well just do wind / solar and work on storage technology.

I'm no scientist, but the article suggests that the methane hydrates may not be entirely stable, and that we're not sure why they don't diffuse. If we disturb them, is there any potential for a runaway destabilization event, such as a limnic eruption?

And seems we are close to a sustained fusion reaction. I wonder how the eventual perfection of fusion power will impact oil producing states. We will still need oil but not as much as we do now.

Close? I suppose it depends on how you define "close."

I think we're at _least_ 20 years away from a commercially-viable fusion power plant, if not much further. Keep in mind that the guy being quoted in this article is the guy responsible for getting Congress to fund his multi-billion dollar experiments, so I don't treat his opinions as neutral. I'm not saying he's bad/evil/lying/whatever; but I am saying that he's inclined to be more optimistic than most.

Oh great ... there goes the planet.The amount of carbon trapped in sea-bed methane clathrates absolutely dwarfs all other fossile carbon sources. Releasing that into the atmosphere would make the current worst cases of the IPCC look like a walk in the park.

Gosh, this is dumb. We need to put money into safe, renewable energy sources, not yet another method of using up a non-renewable source of energy with a need to worry about the permanent sequestration of CO2. Don't we already have enough CO2 we need to worry about, only to add orders of magnitude more? Let alone the risks involved. What if there was an accident that caused the release of methane? Accidents happen. This. Is. Stupid.

And seems we are close to a sustained fusion reaction. I wonder how the eventual perfection of fusion power will impact oil producing states. We will still need oil but not as much as we do now.

Close? I suppose it depends on how you define "close."

I think we're at _least_ 20 years away from a commercially-viable fusion power plant, if not much further. Keep in mind that the guy being quoted in this article is the guy responsible for getting Congress to fund his multi-billion dollar experiments, so I don't treat his opinions as neutral. I'm not saying he's bad/evil/lying/whatever; but I am saying that he's inclined to be more optimistic than most.

Fusion power is a long, long, way off.

Why is everything always 20 years out?

Anyway, he's not the only one showing very promising and similar results. If you do a little searching you learn we seem to be further along than you think.

I wouldn't mind the money spend on this way out there 99.9% likely to be super expensive energy alternative, if at the same time we could get Obama to spend more than a tiny percentage of subsidy and DOE money on advanced nuclear ($250M) - a 100% guaranteed to work already developed dirt cheap solution to AGW.. $3B a year for a program to build the DMSR and blueprint ready IFR would be the best investment a nation could make. The halfwits in the White House spend close to $15B annually on nuke weapons and close to $100B on worthless wind/solar R&D and subsidy.

Course the Chinese are already building the HTGR for 2017 service that the Obama and his team of halfwits are spending their $250M on, projecting costs of 1 cent a kwh and have 70% of the output designated for 60 cent a gallon synfuel production. I guess once the Bomba is gone, he doesn't care if the US has an energy economy that can compete with China's.

I'd suggest that those concerned with carbon emissions should set an example for the rest of us and cease consuming any energy which was generated by burning hydrocarbons. If you're not sitting somewhere fully powered by fission, solar, wind, geothermal, or hydroelectric, please shut all of your electronics down and begin walking to a location where power generation is ethical, clean, and at least non-carbon emitting if not completely renewable.

As for me, given how much methane is down there, let's do it. Let's find a way to harness that energy in a safe and clean manner to diversify our energy portfolio until the point in time where cleaner alternatives (maybe polywell fusion? advanced solar technologies for sure) can replace them without causing substantial economic disruption, such as the effects on food prices in poorer regions of the world caused by the conversion of corn into ethanol.

While we're at it, can we dredge the sea floor to get at the phosphates down there that have run off from modernized farming techniques? I mean, they run off, get into rivers, cause all kinds of trouble. We may as well remove them from the oceanic environment they've been wasted in and recycle them. Reduce, reuse, and recycle!

Hmmm....lets see....way deep underwater there is a vast wealth of CH4 to burn if only we can figure out a way to get this up to the surface with long tubes to generators. Or we could do the harder thing and and generate electricity in situ and run cables? Giant batteries? I would probably use a vacuum that would disrupt the equilibrium and release the clathrate. But transporting that volume is crazy unless one uses long tubing. My 2 cents.

I think the idea of the article is to replace the CH4 with CO2 to form a carbon dioxide clathrate. Seems an idea, but the ones in the ocean are created mostly by bacteria I believe. So not sure how it might work in any volume.

Anyway, he's not the only one showing very promising and similar results. If you do a little searching you learn we seem to be further along than you think.

"20 years" seems to be the default time horizon for any technology that has developed enough to seem reasonably plausible, but that also has deal-killer obstacles for which no one has proposed any reasonable solution.

I'd love some links to reliable studies, if you have them. I'd really like it to be <20 years, and I'm ultimately a believer in fusion power, but we've just been 20 years away for a long time.

Wow, what a genius idea. There's all this methane that's not currently in the atmosphere, lets figure out a way to remedy that.

What cretin thought that was a smart proposal to fund?

LOL, that is one of the first things that popped into my head. I seem to remember methane being called one of the greenhouse gasses that caused the ozone holes.

On the other hand, if I am reading this right, the byproduct of burning methane is CO², which should reduce the amount of methane released...if nothing goes wrong. I imagine the opposite of an oil spill, where methane gas bubbles to the surface and escapes into the atmosphere.

I would like to see a little more use of natural gasses from oil wells, rather than flaring the gas, but in many places, that is a work in progress.

Paradoxically, this could actually be greenhouse negative. As the oceans warm, methane will be released, and methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. Burning it to CO2 could actually reduce the effective greenhouse heating effect.

Safe - arguable. You switch one set of risks for others. The industry really hasn't shown itself to be particularly trustworthy in this respect. Again, there is the high level waste problem.

The very, very few deaths commercial nuclear power has ever caused (below 150 in 50 years, I believe), should give pause to anyone arguing that nuclear is dangerous. Coal, gas, oil and even wind cause death rates per MW delivered that are many orders of magnitude higher. And most of those deaths were caused by Communist plants, not even Western commercial plants.

The safety of nuclear is not even subject of discussion.

ColdWetDog wrote:

Unlimited? Hardly. Do you understand how much it costs to build a nuc plant?

It really inherently does not cost all that much money. Costs are driven by enormous regulation and piles of oversight. Double, treble, quadruple and even more levels of "supervision". Funny thing, in the U.S., the plants themselves must pay for the federal drones who supervise them.

The French, you know, have contained costs to a certain point by sticking to just one model or two. The U.S., for reasons that are not clear to me, builds each plant to unique designs.

At the end of the day, I agree that costs are high. But notice the following: French power prices, where nuclear supplies almost 80% of all electricity (yeah!), are significantly cheaper than its neighbors (Spain, Germany, Italy, Netherlands).

Burning the fuel where it exists rather than transporting it to a power plant is a fantastic idea, and with the estimates of the amounts, it sounds like this is a tremendous energy opportunity. But only $1M of funding seems drastically low for a concept with such promise.

Energy must be transported to the point of use in some form: fuel; heat; electricity; or something else.

About greenhouse gases and such, why don't we grow crops on buildings? Then we'd kill the famine in Africa (assuming business people don't get in the way of that) and we'd produce more oxygen, AND reduce our Co2.

PLUS we'd make more jobs for the harvesting, AND we could use air conditioner run-off to give to the plants. It's win win win win win.

I applaud scientific research intended to understand the system dynamics of this trapped methane.

We're simply not investing enough in distributed power production, which is more robust, more difficult to disrupt and must be carbon free.

I hope we're moving toward a future decoupled from fossil based energy, or nuclear energy. Both are highly centralized, highly subject to corruption in pricing, offer little to no competition in today's 100 year old market.

So, its great to understand why this enormous threat to Earth's atmosphere remains sequestered and keep it that way. This seems a larger benefit that energy extraction.

I think we're at _least_ 20 years away from a commercially-viable fusion power plant, if not much further.Fusion power is a long, long, way off.

Twenty years is right around the corner. It's near term. Some people will still be driving the same car in 20 years. I have t-shirts over 20 years old. The average mortgage is for half again as long. Fifteen current congressmen have been in office for over three dozen years.

It's people thinking "20 years is forever" and "the future will never happen" who got us into this mess to start with. "Not my problem".

What impact would pumping CO2 down into the ocean in this manner have on ocean acidification? The article touches on it briefly, but I thought that there was already talk of doing this for carbon capture/storage that was abandoned.

Paradoxically, this could actually be greenhouse negative. As the oceans warm, methane will be released, and methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. Burning it to CO2 could actually reduce the effective greenhouse heating effect.

This clathrate is made at a certain pressure and temperature. Which is why it is along areas of the continental shelf. If the oceans got warmer, most likely they would shift down a bit on the shelf. Shouldn't be too much of a change, unless we ran out of down. hehe

I wouldn't mind the money spend on this way out there 99.9% likely to be super expensive energy alternative, if at the same time we could get Obama to spend more than a tiny percentage of subsidy and DOE money on advanced nuclear ($250M) - a 100% guaranteed to work already developed dirt cheap solution to AGW.. $3B a year for a program to build the DMSR and blueprint ready IFR would be the best investment a nation could make. The halfwits in the White House spend close to $15B annually on nuke weapons and close to $100B on worthless wind/solar R&D and subsidy.

Course the Chinese are already building the HTGR for 2017 service that the Obama and his team of halfwits are spending their $250M on, projecting costs of 1 cent a kwh and have 70% of the output designated for 60 cent a gallon synfuel production. I guess once the Bomba is gone, he doesn't care if the US has an energy economy that can compete with China's.

I wouldn't mind the money spend on this way out there 99.9% likely to be super expensive energy alternative, if at the same time we could get Obama to spend more than a tiny percentage of subsidy and DOE money on advanced nuclear ($250M) - a 100% guaranteed to work already developed dirt cheap solution to AGW.. $3B a year for a program to build the DMSR and blueprint ready IFR would be the best investment a nation could make. The halfwits in the White House spend close to $15B annually on nuke weapons and close to $100B on worthless wind/solar R&D and subsidy.

Course the Chinese are already building the HTGR for 2017 service that the Obama and his team of halfwits are spending their $250M on, projecting costs of 1 cent a kwh and have 70% of the output designated for 60 cent a gallon synfuel production. I guess once the Bomba is gone, he doesn't care if the US has an energy economy that can compete with China's.

I'm no scientist, but the article suggests that the methane hydrates may not be entirely stable, and that we're not sure why they don't diffuse. If we disturb them, is there any potential for a runaway destabilization event, such as a limnic eruption?

That was the thought that first popped into my head. Like you, I lack the depth of scientific knowledge to know how likely such a scenario would be, but it just seems rife with possibility for disaster.

I wouldn't mind the money spend on this way out there 99.9% likely to be super expensive energy alternative, if at the same time we could get Obama to spend more than a tiny percentage of subsidy and DOE money on advanced nuclear ($250M) - a 100% guaranteed to work already developed dirt cheap solution to AGW.. $3B a year for a program to build the DMSR and blueprint ready IFR would be the best investment a nation could make. The halfwits in the White House spend close to $15B annually on nuke weapons and close to $100B on worthless wind/solar R&D and subsidy.

Course the Chinese are already building the HTGR for 2017 service that the Obama and his team of halfwits are spending their $250M on, projecting costs of 1 cent a kwh and have 70% of the output designated for 60 cent a gallon synfuel production. I guess once the Bomba is gone, he doesn't care if the US has an energy economy that can compete with China's.